内容摘要：A glimpse into the people, places and daily life in Palestine before the 1948 Nakba.

A glimpse into the people, places and daily life in Palestine before the 1948 Nakba.

Under Washington’s sanctions regime, companies registered anywhere in the world are at risk of being blacklisted if they are deemed to be helping Russia evade sanctions.Some human rights advocates argue that manufacturers are responsible for the sale of their products, whether sold with their approval or not, under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

"Companies are responsible for how their products are being used. It’s crucial for companies to make sure that they are not causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts related to their operations. They should seek to prevent or mitigate the adverse human rights effects," Ella Skybenko, a researcher at the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, told Al Jazeera.Skybenko said that companies should carry out enhanced due diligence and put in place mechanisms to identify suspicious orders from third parties.“For instance, if the order is unusually large, a producer can start asking questions,” she said. “I know some companies require their customers to testify that their goods would not be shipped to Russia.”

Mechanisms for holding companies accountable, however, are limited, apart from The International Criminal Court, and only address the most direct examples of harm, such as where their components are used in weapons used to target civilians.Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) maintains a database of foreign components reportedly found in Russian and Iranian weapons in Ukraine, listing thousands of items from dozens of countries including the US and many members of the EU.

Among the companies named in the database are household brands including Bosch, Hitachi, Canon and LG.

Bosch told Al Jazeera that it “instituted and maintains policies and procedures reasonably designed to meet and achieve regulatory compliance requirements, applicable export control laws and regulations."published on Friday by the news agency Reuters also suggests the actual sum is much lower. Using US Treasury summaries, Reuters found that only $19bn in federal spending had been cut, though it noted that some savings may require more time to be reflected in the Treasury Department’s data.

Regardless, all of those figures fall far short of the goal of $2 trillion saved that Musk initially set out to achieve.When asked about the discrepancy on Friday, Musk maintained that $1 trillion in savings remained a long-term goal.

“I’m confident that over time, we’ll see a trillion dollars of savings, a reduction – a trillion dollars of waste and fraud reduction,” he said.But critics have questioned if DOGE will continue with the same verve following Musk’s departure.